


Saṃsāra

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Series: Stories Around the Fire: The Tristhad Vignettes [5]
Category: Hannibal (TV), King Arthur (2004)
Genre: BDSM, Fluff, M/M, Mentions of Death, Reincarnation AU, Violence, adoration, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-18
Updated: 2015-04-18
Packaged: 2018-03-24 15:23:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3773671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“My grandmother told me once,” Galahad says, “that you will always live the life you are supposed to, and that if you miss something in one lifetime, you come back to complete it. If you don’t achieve your potential, give all your love… you come back, again and again, to make sure you do it, so the world balances out and the sky turns as it should.” He hums, nosing softly against his friend. “Can you imagine, coming back over and over to finish something you don’t know you’re even supposed to do? It’s like watching this outpost. Pointless. Endless.”</i>
</p><p>Lives and lifetimes together...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saṃsāra

**Author's Note:**

> This is almost a showreel preview of what is coming up later this year on [wwhiskeyandbloodd](http://wwhiskeyandbloodd.tumblr.com/)!! Check out the notes at the bottom once you're done for all the juicy details...

_Blink, and you’ll miss it._

Eyelids flicker, water warming against them and slipping down from the corners like tears. The snow is falling slowly this time of year, not yet too cold to be outside, but cold enough that the little flakes form instead of the misty rain that has plagued them for weeks.

Galahad blinks as more flakes settle on his skin and vanish.

“It looks like the stars are falling,” he murmurs, knows Tristan hears him, even though the man is not lying side by side with him anymore, up to stoke the fire. “Just peeling from the sky and cascading down like this. What if they are?”

“Stars?”

“Yes.”

Tristan raises his head to look, his hair peppered with the delicate things, not melting as quickly as they would against his cheeks.

“Why?”

Galahad just shrugs, shifts his fingers over and over each other, numb with cold but still not gloved.

“Maybe a reminder that even they can fall. Not even them, immortal. Cycling from one life as a star, to this new one as snow.”

Tristan lifts his face, squinting against the whorls of white, pale across the black sky. He blinks to free the few that grace his lashes, and drags his knuckles over ink-lined cheeks before returning to Galahad, and dropping heavy beside him.

“What becomes of them?”

Galahad turns towards him, and loosens to let Tristan take his hand when the older boy reaches for it. Between palms worn raw from gripping reins and leather-bound hilts, he presses Galahad’s tired fingers to warm them, rubbing briskly.

“The stars?”

With a hum, Tristan watches as embers, stirred crackling from young branches rise to dance upward among the earthbound snow. “It seems as though they return, does it not? Falling, but never settling. Returning to the sky from which they came.”

Galahad sighs up into the cool air, watching his breath engulf a few stray flakes, watching them melt to nothing, and he smiles.

“The snow feeds the seeds, the seeds become trees, the trees reach for the sky, seeking to go back, because they remember.”

It’s a silly thought, he knows, but it’s late, and he’s exhausted. Too long left to guard a post no one seems to want to go near. Once a month having provisions given them. A month more, they were told last time, before someone would come and replace them, and they could return to training, having done their duty here.

“Then the trees flower,” he continues, “then pod, and then seed. Birds eat them and get closer to the sky. When they die, they become the new stars we see.” For a moment he is quiet, then he laughs, just a gentle thing, and turns to lie on his side, pressing his face against the older boy’s lap, nuzzling himself to comfort there as a hand slides into his hair and strokes it.

“I need to grow out of my childish stories,” Galahad mumbles.

Through his braids, Tristan watches neither fire nor snow, earth nor sky, but only Galahad. Careful fingers twine and twist through dark curls, as if to learn each one by one. Intimacy born from time and space, alone together.

“I hope you do not,” Tristan finally says. “You tell them better than I do.”

“They’re still only stories. It’s silly -”

“It isn’t,” insists Tristan softly. “How else do legends grow? Or children learn? We will have many more adventures than sitting on a hill,” he adds, a smile gathering beneath his eyes. “Someone will need to tell them.”

Galahad laughs again, pushes himself to sit more, leaning back against Tristan who wraps his arms around him, raising his knees to balance and support them both.

“I hope we do more than guard an abandoned outpost.”

“They did say it was a test of character.”

“More a test of faith,” Galahad shakes his head, turning it, after, to rest against Tristan’s shoulder, kissing his neck softly. For a while they are quiet, just two boys pretending to watch the sky and instead watching each other.

“My grandmother told me once,” Galahad says, “that you will always live the life you are supposed to, and that if you miss something in one lifetime, you come back to complete it. If you don’t achieve your potential, give all your love… you come back, again and again, to make sure you do it, so the world balances out and the sky turns as it should.” He hums, nosing softly against his friend. “Can you imagine, coming back over and over to finish something you don’t know you’re even supposed to do? It’s like watching this outpost. Pointless. Endless.”

Tristan closes his eyes, and lets warmth drift across his throat as cold settles to his face. He rubs along the ridges of Galahad’s back, over broadening shoulders, muscles made strong through their work and practice. They are no longer the children they were when they met, but so new to manhood that still it feels like a strange and wondrous thing, a constant discovery of what their bodies and minds are capable.

“It is the point of living,” Tristan supposes. “To push us towards our purpose, whatever it might be, to do as much as we can while we are alive to do it.” His throat clicks, jerking in a hard swallow and relaxing in a breath of laughter when Galahad’s fingers spread over his chest. “I like the thought of it.”

“You do,” Galahad asks, in mild disbelief.

“That if I act wrongly, I can make it right,” Tristan shrugs. “That I might get to enjoy all of this again. The stars and the snow. The quiet.” A pause, and he grins, crooked. “You.”

“But don’t you think that -”

“I think that you talk too much,” Tristan murmurs against his hair. Galahad laughs, shoving against Tristan’s chest only to find that his arms wrap stronger around his shoulders, to hold him near.

“You just said, not a breath before -”

Tristan meets his argument with a kiss, swift and steady, hot as the fire by which they lay when he pins the younger to the snow-damp earth. 

Galahad just laughs, hands up to push Tristan off him, then sliding to his face to hold him closer, too comfortable to decide and relenting to being touched and held this way.

So Tristan holds him.

This is silly. They are silly. Two boys at the edge of the world kissing in the first snow. When they should be sleeping, training, practicing, scouting far and coming back before dawn. Should, could, would, but this is better. Pressing close to another is better. Touching soft hair and slipping through it with the snow that slicks it. Pressing down and kissing and feeling his body come alive is better.

Feeling a body come back to life is not nearly as enjoyable.

Hannibal knows his lungs work because they burn, knows his blood is hot because he can feel it streaking from his nose and into his mouth and choking him more. Two days of this and he feels like he has been alive and dead so many times over he is no longer himself.

He studies bodies, and he doesn’t know how his own is still functional. He works and heals and protects, and he is unsure what he has done to deserve this much suffering. Every time he wakes up he wonders who he is, and how many days and weeks and months have held him captive here. Every time he is greeted with another question, another bucket of water poured over sopping cloth when he does not give an answer he does not have.

He doesn’t know.

He wonders if any poor soul here does.

The bucket, this time, is upturned onto him without the burlap that closes over mouth and nose, meant now just to jerk him to alertness and curl him immediately in fear of worse.

“Walk, before I make you crawl like a dog.”

Hannibal just blinks, too exhausted to raise his eyes. He just swallows, brings a hand to his nose to wipe the blood away, though he manages just to smear it over his face instead.

“Where?” he whispers.

“You walk where I tell you to walk. Get _up_.”

So he does. Somehow. And he goes. Somehow. To a room well-appointed and too long to be anything but a dining hall. Once. Before snow became ash and lives became blood in the ground.

Hannibal’s hands spread before him to catch his balance as he’s pushed forward, told to walk closer, to kneel by the table, that he would lose his legs if he ran on them instead. Numbness spikes needles down his legs as he settles to the stone floor, and lit by fire focuses on only the shining black leather shoes and the white hems of robes before him. The scent of smoked meats and wine is enough even through his stoppered nose to render him nauseated. He closes his eyes, as if somehow one less sense to absorb might help ease the burden of the others.

“Are you going to kill me?”he asks, unbidden and with little care by now for any sort of penance. His voice is raw with apology, with pleas and begging. He is sick with it, and none has afforded him sleep or sustenance, relief or repair.

One of the men laughs, a raucous, wild outburst that startles Hannibal into sudden tension, fingers curled into fists against his knees.

“ _Kill_ you? Why would we? _How_ could we? Murder is a mortal _sin_ ,” the man says slowly, loudly. “Men of the cloth do not _murder_. We _absolve_.”

Hannibal lifts his eyes when they flare wide in dismay at the proclamation, but he keeps them no higher than the knees of the man who addresses him, the one beside still silent.

“The _concern_ , you see, is that we cannot _absolve_ sins that are not made _clear_ to us through _confession_. One must feel _guilt_ in order to receive _forgiveness_. One must _work_ to _undo_ their wrongs.” A pause, and a snort of frustration. “He’s not even _listening_.”

A cup clinks to the table, and with a far softter voice, steadier - and by compare, nearly gentle - the other inquisitor says only, “He’s listening.”

Hannibal's brows gather, enough to actually show a change of expression on his face, from what feels like weeks of just one: agony. For the first time since he was accused, assaulted, tortured here, he feels surprised. He wonders if he can not - not listen, not care, not be. He wonders if the man will notice when it happens. He wonders how.

He has heard only rumors of doctors in distant lands healing the mind and understanding it as he does the body. He never put much worth to it. Such things are surely fiction. A human being has no power in souls and minds as God does.

Hannibal blinks when he hears that voice again, low and almost soothing, almost familiar. 

"You are accused of desecration," the inquisitor says. "Illegally obtaining and taking apart sacred remains of the dead from consecrated ground for sinful purposes. It is blasphemy."

"I am a physician," Hannibal counters gently, eyes still down to just the knees of the robed men before him, fabric bent and soft and grotesquely clean. "I must learn the body to heal it."

" _Cure_? Not if they're already _dead_ ," laughs the first man. "All you're doing is _damning_ them by mutilating their _mortal remains_ ," he adds, less for the sake of discussion than to make it explicitly clear where he stands in this.

A pair of shoes draw beneath the chair, their wooden soles scraping across stone. The quieter man stands, and Hannibal's body snaps rigid. It is always the silent ones to be most feared, not the ones who accuse and shout and pray. He lets his eyes slip closed, and beneath the tattered hem of his once fine sleeve, his fingers brush over a slip of metal, found and hoarded and honed.

The inquisitor's breath is so close as to be warm, so close that Hannibal's arm jerks in a rough twitch. Wait to be touched, wait, and when he does, Hannibal will show him suffering -

"Look at me," asks the priest. "Please."

Hannibal's gaze settles on the small smile that awaits him, obscene in its gentleness, a profanity of kindness. The bearded inquisitor's eyes of blue and curls of brown accent a face that surprises Hannibal with its youth.

And it does little to remove the garments that mark his station. Little to remove the makeshift blade of bent scrap iron that cuts into Hannibal's fingers. Little to restore the days lost to pain and terror.

"I knew he wasn't listening -"

"He is," the brunette says again, crouching comfortably, and smoothing his robes across his knees. "Man cannot be cured by worldly means. Without God's grace, there is no purpose for medicine. By committing heresies to heal, you all but assure yourself and them to damnation."

“That is a _confession_ ,” spits the other priest. “He said that he’s done it, he offers no repentance, _take_ him and _burn_ him.”

The boy - and he is, still, just a boy - just lifts his hand, a gentle gesture, and splays his fingers to quiet his companion, eyes still on Hannibal, clear and beautiful and seeking something Hannibal is unsure he can give him. But it stays his hand, at least, for the moment.

“Repentance cannot be forced, not with torture, not with bribery. It must come on its own or it is not pure.”

The priest’s eyes slip from Hannibal’s for a moment, down to his wrist, reddened by restraints and hiding Hannibal’s hope, little and sharp, against it. He sighs, brows furrowing, and looks at Hannibal again.

“Lives do not end when we end them,” he says softly, enough that the man behind him cannot hear and turns away in petulant annoyance. “They are not ours to end. We are set free only when we have completed our course set by God, only then.” He presses his lips together, sighs through them to part them again. “Damnation awaits an untimely escape, you are not destined for it. You can change your course, show Him you are still listening, as you are to me. Do not.”

“Mercy,” Hannibal breathes, through clenched teeth and tightened jaw that resists the word even as he whispers it. “Mercy, for a night. Let me sleep, and I will listen.”

One more time so near to death, and he is certain it will take him. He’ll let it take him, if it means an end to this cycle, countless deaths and like Lazarus revived, always with an animal gasp that splits the air when he finds himself awakened -

“Breathe.”

Will trembles, his throat working hard to force air through his nose, to fill his chest and release again.

“Good,” Hannibal tells him. Across Will’s cheek, he drags the flat fold of leather, smooth and warm where it has cracked against bare skin. The younger man shivers into the contact, nuzzling the riding crop where Hannibal strokes it.

Hannibal’s riding boots click against the floor as he steps back to survey his friend. Bent on hands and knees, he cuts a striking form on the four-post bed, its straw-stuffed mattress curving soft beneath. His bare body trembles in anticipation, and Hannibal runs a kid leather glove down his spine to curl his backside higher.

“Are you alright?” he asks, teasing a kiss against the sweat-damp curls behind Will’s ear. The silk fluff of his cravat tickles as he eases another press of lips lower, to a flushed and shaking shoulder.

A laugh, soft, and Will shakes his head, nods, laughs again. He aches, with the stripes painted against his skin, with the position he holds, with the desperate need to have Hannibal touch him again.

Beyond the door, the sounds of the club do well to have it live up to its name, and they, too, drive Will’s pleasure higher. His cock twitches between his legs, balls and base bound tight with a heavy silk ribbon, like a gift for Hannibal to unwrap should he choose to - if he chooses to.

“Yes,” he whispers finally, lifting his shoulder just a little in a semblance of another nuzzle, though he remains otherwise unmoving, obedient in holding his position for Hannibal’s torment and his pleasure. It was he who had asked to come here first, he who has since asked to go again. He knows Hannibal still hesitates, in the beginning, to hurt him this way, but he knows just as well that once those inhibitions are gone, he wears beautiful bruises on his thighs proudly for him, for weeks.

Each one will be touched, by bare fingers when they lay together at the end of their debauchery. Each bloom in violet or red will be kissed until they fade to green, to yellow, to pale skin once more. He doesn’t imagine that Hannibal was so careful with the others who came before - he doesn’t imagine he would be now, if he showed them any attention at all, cruel or kind. Affection seeps hot into his skin where Hannibal’s mouth touches, down a work-strong bicep, to the ridges of his ribs.

Will ducks his head and tenses, and the strike of the crop against his bare backside draws a yelp despite.

“Chin up,” Hannibal tells him. “I wish to see your cheeks darken.”

With hardly time to even process the words, Will is swatted again, harder than before, enough that it forces a hiss through clenched teeth and rocks his body forward. His muscles twitch unheeding of his own attempt to control them, quivering from the strike, from the numbness and heat and cold that follow.

He does lift his chin, though, and bites his lip as another strike cuts blissful heat over his thigh and pulls a shudder from him despite how hard he tries to hold himself still. It is always that, that Will craves. The control required of him to be still, be good, not move away from something painful, something cruel. The control in giving control up.

He feels alive at Hellfire.

He feels like he has known and trusted Hannibal forever.

The crop rests gentle against the insides of his thighs and Will trembles, laughing in breathless, nervous little bouts as it taps back and forth. He spreads his legs further, arches his back in the process. Closing his eyes, Will parts his lips as the soft fold of leather strokes between his cheeks, down to his balls, hot and heavy with the need for release, down over his cock to catch another drop of slick clear fluid that drips from the end.

“What secrets you’ve kept from me,” Hannibal murmurs, savoring the sight of Will’s cock twitching up against his belly before settling to the warm leather again. “In your quiet solitude, I see now where your thoughts have wandered those long hours. What in your life has moved you to this, I wonder? What ancient scars set upon your soul seek relief in being so scratched?”

Hannibal taps Will’s livid cockhead, only a touch, but enough that the younger man cries out long, moaning longer still. Withdrawing the crop from beneath his dark-veined length, Hannibal breathes in from it the scent of cowhide and tanning agents, sweat and skin, and the earthy musk of the drip clinging like a raindrop.

With a hum, and the susurrus of his tailcoat against skin-tight breeches, Hannibal bends as if he were a butler. A turn of wrist offers the crop forward, slick with precome, as if it were a debauched and impractical platter, accompanied by a faint smile.

“Taste,” he says, eyes drawing up in pleasure.

Will bites his lip as if to resist, before parting them to accept the spoon that Hannibal offers, and the treat upon it. The silky custard spreads across his tongue, and crispy sugar shatters with a pop before melting. He presses his fingers to his mouth and shakes his head.

“You don’t care for it,” Hannibal asks, and Will shakes his head harder to see the dismay.

“I don’t know where you’ve managed to find the stuff for it,” Will murmurs around the mouthful of crème brûlée. “Eggs and - sugar. Sugar?”

“Sugar,” Hannibal confirms.

“And whatever else,” Will chimes, swallowing and lifting his chin up as if to accept another spoonful, were it offered. “I don’t think I’d mind the rationing at all if it tasted like this.”

“It is all a matter of perspective,” Hannibal tells him, amused, and dips the spoon into the little ceramic pot again to feed another spoonful to Will. “And priorities.”

They have long ago put down the blackout curtains, long ago settled together on the floor, one candle in a tall bottle between them, enough to see by. Not that they need to see, they know the other by heart, with touch and taste and smell. Hannibal allows himself a spoonful as well, savoring the texture and the taste, still warm from the oven, and their only sweet treat this month. Well worth the time and the conservation.

“If one does not drink tea with sugar, or coffee with milk -”

“It is a travesty to put milk in coffee,” Will says, grinning when Hannibal leans closer to feed him more of their dessert.

“Then those ingredients can be appropriated elsewhere.”

Will’s smile widens around the soft sweet, and he slips his fingers over Hannibal’s to steal the spoon from him, and feed him in turn. Little tastes, a third of the spoon covered each time, to make it last. Tuned low enough to just be heard, the voice on the radio recites the evening news, movements of far away men in far away places, fronts and skirmishes that neither boy can - or wants - to imagine. Not when life, here, right here between them is so simple. Classes during the day, and this at night, when they can abscond away from the university to be alone, together.

“If you like sugar in your tea,” Will says, “you should use it for that. You don’t need to save it for -”

For him.

To share the same way they share everything now, jumpers gathered from the floor and dog-eared novels and kisses, stolen in secret school corridors.

“I know I need not,” Hannibal replies simply. “I wish to.”

“I can’t cook,” Will protests mildly, inching closer as he scoots cross-legged over the floor, so that their knees are touching. A mischievous smile appears and he tries to tamp it down, but he knows that without fail Hannibal sees it linger in his eyes. “I don’t know what I can do to repay you for such a sacrifice as unsweetened tea.”

Hannibal just blinks, brows rising enough to suggest a playful sort of innocence as he holds out the little pot again, obediently opens his mouth as he’s fed more of the dessert. They have had this for months, now. Together. More often than not, Will staying here, heaving his books with him and never taking them away. Piling his clothes in the small closet and leaving them there. Hannibal loves it, seeing them there, Will’s smell still lingering in the soft cotton like a promise.

“A high price,” Hannibal jests, amused, warm, and holds the spoon between his teeth when he is fed again, smiling wide as Will tries to work it gently free, laughs when he is unable. Hannibal takes it from him again. “I would have you for this night, and the next day. As you are.”

Will laughs. “And classes -”

“Can wait,” Hannibal murmurs, offering more of the treat to him, dismayed that the spoon already scrapes the bottom of the little pot.

“You’re going to make me flunk,” Will sighs, feigning mourning at the thought of skipping classes. “Or catch cold, if you keep me _just_ as I am.”

“Then you have your reason to miss them,” reasons Hannibal. “The latter excusing the former.”

“Nothing at all?” Will laments.

“Not a stitch.”

Curling his tongue around the spoon, pressing it flat against its curve, Will savors the last of the custard and leans to kiss him, laying his palms to Hannibal’s thighs, softly stroking the fine hairs that cover them. Hannibal’s hand is still warm from the dish when he sets it to Will’s bare back, touching fingertips down the ridges of his spine, lower, lower, as Will arches forward to spread the sweetness between them, with just a hint of burnt sugar caught between their tongues.

Hannibal hums, guiding Will closer, legs over his own until he can sit against him, curled in Hannibal’s lap as Hannibal crosses his ankles and lifts his knees to cradle him that way. It is warm, here, between them. The oven still open after making this to let the residual heat fill the little apartment and keep winter at bay.

He arches, now, to kiss Will gently, just brushes of lips and closed eyes to savor every sensation. He holds Will like he is made of porcelain, worships his pale skin the same way. They have been bared to each other often, now, they have been intimate and swallowed the other’s cries of pleasure to claim as their own.

“Your lips will taste sweet for days,” Hannibal murmurs, eyes wrinkling at the corners in his pleasure. “Sweeter,” he amends.

“Too many sweets will spoil you,” Will warns mildly, tossing back a curl of hair from his face.

“Will they?”

Will hums in wary agreement. “I think maybe, it might be best to have only a little at a time. Like just here,” he says, pressing his finger to his bottom lip.

“Only that one?” Hannibal asks, as Will shifts forward, cock trapped soft against the older boy’s stomach as Hannibal’s hands cup his backside.

“Just the one for now.”

Hannibal tastes, then, where he is allowed. He gathers Will’s bottom lip between his own two and sucks it softly, teasing the delicate skin inside with his teeth, until whimpering, Will arches against him. He presses his hands against the downy hair spread over Hannibal’s chest to move him away, his lip damp and flushed bright as he pulls back, laughing.

The radio news announcer closes down the evening’s broadcast, and Will is glad to hear his dour drone rise into Glenn Miller’s brassy horns instead.

“Maybe a little more,” decides Will.

“Only a little.”

“Only just. Here,” Will says, tapping a finger against the hollow of his throat.

Hannibal obeys, takes just the little bit of skin allowed against his lips, not to kiss but to brush, to tickle, to sigh over and nuzzle until Will squirms with it, wanting more. Then just tongue, the tip of it to wet the skin, sighing more to dry it again before touching him again. Over and over in the playful teasing, until Will is laughing, one hand up against his face and Hannibal finally, finally kisses him there.

He holds Will against him, palm splayed over his back, the other wrapped around his waist. He knows that soon he will stand, carry Will to the bed and kiss his way between his legs as they spread for him with a laugh, a shiver. He could taste that boy forever, pull those lovely sweet sounds from him again and again, before giving himself over entirely to the boy’s clever mind and coy mercy.

“Here?” he asks, nuzzling a hard little nipple until Will squirms from him, shakes his head. So Hannibal sighs his way across to the other, drawing his tongue over it with gentle laps, eyes up as Will shakes his head again, breathless, eyes hooded, cock pressing hot against Hannibal’s stomach, now.

“Where?” Hannibal asks then, smiling. Will bites his lip and grins, cheeks ruddy, darkening fading summer freckles. “Here, perhaps,” Hannibal muses, trailing his tongue across Will’s collarbone, and sucking lightly where it joins knobby to his shoulder. “Or here,” he offers, kissing open heat above Will’s heart. “It might be that here is best -”

The underclassman slings his arms around Hannibal’s neck, gasping when he’s leaned back, one of Hannibal’s hands pressed to the bottom of his spine, and the other against his quaking stomach. Blue eyes flash wide, uncomprehending, and Will’s voice dies wet in his throat and heat spills over graceful fingers and a curved blade. Hannibal’s shoulders twist and drag the knife sideways, parting skin and fat and the purple lining of viscera.

He is too hot, too cold, all at once and the taste of tinfoil singes his tongue. The gout of blood that spills down his legs is the only reason Will knows they’re there at all, arms tightening trembling around Hannibal’s neck as his knees give way. And he is held, just as intimately, just as close as always, only now Hannibal is trembling as his presses his wrist to Will’s back, between his shoulders, and murmuring words Will can barely hear.

Images flicker wildly, memories that are not memories, words that are in Hannibal’s voice but not his own.

Will thinks of cliches, and how lives are endless, just lifetimes that are lingering.

"- didn't want it."

Will wonders what he had rejected from a man for whom he had willingly walked into a knife. Knowing. Lifetimes of knowing.

He doesn’t know when he hits the ground, just that he’s sitting, small, and before him Hannibal looms larger, until Will can see nothing else. Has he ever, really, seen anything else, or anyone? Everything he’s ever known has lead to this, and so he came unarmed, unwilling to fight against how they would - must - inevitably end. The floor is hot beneath him, where another lifetime spills.

“Do you believe you could change me,” he demands, “the way I’ve changed you?”

Again and again.

Time after time.

Will’s breath does not fill him enough to laugh, that Hannibal could be so blind to it. At every turn, they’ve been pulled together. At every turn, desperate to become what the other needs. A ceaseless cycle of discovery and loss, as unbreakable as Hannibal thinks himself now. Fleeting lives not fully lived. Cycled again and again to get it right when neither know how. Mistakes and loves and aches and each other.

Blink, and you’ll miss them.

Instead, he reminds him, what they both have known for lifetimes.

“I already did.”

**Author's Note:**

> The Spanish Inquisition AU is for the stunning [Jennifer](http://pontarrtingspock.tumblr.com/), a brief preview of what is coming up for the Little Arts of Vice boys, a WWII AU that we have always wanted to write, and more canon stories coming up once season 3 kicks in! We hope you look forward to them as much as we do to writing them :D
> 
>  **Saṃsāra** : is the repeating cycle of birth, life and death (reincarnation) as well as one's actions and consequences in the past, present, and future in Hinduism, Buddhism, Bon, Jainism, Taoism and Sikhism.


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